President Nicolas Maduro proposed in a meeting with governors and mayors a couple of days after the murders that they work jointly so that “in a month we may have concrete results in practice and in the formulation of a policy” to combat crime.

Venezuela had more than 11,000 homicides last year, down from roughly 16,000 in 2012, according to official figures.

But the independent Venezuelan Violence Observatory says that the number of murders nationwide was more on the order of 25,000 during the course of 2013.